World highlights

¤ Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin launched a winter election campaign yesterday after his minority Liberal government lost a vote of confidence on Monday night over a corruption scandal. Mr Martin spoke to Governor General Michaelle Jean, representative of head of state Queen Elizabeth, to have Parliament formally dissolved and set the vote for January 23.

¤ Veteran statesman Shimon Peres will announce today he is leaving the Labour Party to back Ariel Sharon in Israel's March election, without formally joining the Prime Minister's new party, Channel 10 TV said. There was no immediate confirmation from Mr Peres's aides. Channel 10 said Mr Peres, attending an Israeli-Palestinian football match in Barcelona, conveyed his decision to one of its reporters accompanying him on the trip.

¤ At least 60 people were killed when they were swept off the roof of a train into the river below as the train crossed a bridge in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local officials said yesterday. The accident happened on Monday, around 200 km south of the town of Kindu, as the train travelled towards the southern town of Lubumbashi.

¤ Parliament approved a reform of Italy's penal code yesterday that will cut the time magistrates can take to prosecute many crimes such as corruption while increasing prison terms for mobsters and repeat offenders. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's allies say the new law will speed up Italy's notoriously slow legal system, but critics say it will have the reverse effect and encourage defendants to drag out their cases to win automatic reprieves.

¤ Nine people were killed and 65 wounded by suspected suicide bombers in two Bangladesh cities yesterday, apparently the latest in a wave of attacks by militants fighting to turn the country into a sharia-based Islamic state. Police said three people, including two officers, were killed and 15 wounded by blasts at a checkpoint outside a court building in the port city of Chittagong. They said the third person who died was believed to be the bomber.

¤ President Mahmoud Abbas suspended his Fatah party primaries throughout the Palestinian territories yesterday in the face of violence and fraud that have underlined doubts about his grip on power. With a parliamentary election and face-off at the ballot box with the powerful Hamas militant group less than two months away, Mr Abbas halted his party's primaries in the occupied West Bank yesterday, a day after suspending them in Gaza.

¤ Two men appeared in a British court yesterday accused of leaking a secret document which a newspaper said showed that US President George W. Bush wanted to bomb Arabic television station Al Jazeera. The hearing came a week after the Daily Mirror reported that a British government memo said Prime Minister Tony Blair had talked Mr Bush out of bombing the broadcaster's headquarters in Qatar in April last year. The White House has dismissed the report as "outlandish" and on Monday Mr Blair denied receiving any details of a reported US proposal to bomb Al Jazeera.